Ibby
2011-02-11 11:41:42 UTC
Dear all,
After being an avid fan of aviation most of my life and enjoying the
freedom to ‘travel’ anywhere in the world in the sim for the past 8
years I’m having to give it up to save my sanity.
Over the years I’ve enjoying using FS9 then into FSX, purchased £100s
and £100s of pounds on add ons but more importantly spend thousands on
pc hardware and upgrades to get the best performance it can give. As
some of you know I have one heck of a high specification pc but that
all means nothing when you have a program like FSX which is so full of
bugs and errors which the FS Community fail to find solutions for.
Only 4 months ago I went from an i7 920 to a 980X and my 295GTX up to
a 480GTX, also changed my 1600 (8.8.8.24) DDR3 memory to 1600
(6.8.6.24), these 3 items cost me in excess of £1200 and what a waste
of money it’s been. This follows spending about £2000 building an
upgraded system about 12 months before and about £3000 18 months
before that.
I’ve become SO frustrated trying everything possible to get rid of the
dreaded errors and CTDs that besiege FSX. In Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) I
often got the dreaded Black Screen of Death, often caused by switching
to the desktop or simply clicking a menu and the graphics system
failing to redraw the screen though the sound continued. There was no
way out of it apart from closing the sim and starting again. I was
getting NTDLL.dll errors and more frustrating D3D.dll errors. Could
happily be flying along and between 10mins or over 2hrs the sim would
suddenly freeze with the hourglass, after a few mins an error report
would state the D3D.dll module has caused the crash. It’s the most
popular form of error in FSX but NO one knows how to fix it. I have
followed forums by NickN etc. It can happen on any part of the planet
or any aircraft so I know it’s not faulty scenery etc. Many say it
relates to the graphics driver or DirectX but they are both up to
date, Ive also tried older drivers. Ive tried adding lines into the
config file which flag a warning if textures etc fail to load as this
can cause CTDs but nothing.
I have worked solidly for the past 4 months pulling what little hair I
have left out to no avail. I’ve wiped the system, reinstalled the OS
and up-to-date drivers, installed the sim with minimal addons like
UTX, tried lowering overclocks on gpu and cpu, ran at stock speeds,
used a fresh vanilla config file, tried tweaks, tried various display
settings, tried adjusting graphic driver settings for AA, AF etc at
driver level and also forced through nvidia inspector but NOTHING
works. I managed to track down a copy of Windows XP 64 bit and set up
a dual boot and reinstalled FSX (after uninstalling it all from
Windows 7). Whilst things improved slightly like no more black
screens the D3D.dll error is still there so it can’t be an OS or
driver issue. Now my frustrations have increased since I upgraded the
hardware recently so as final tests I put the 295GTX back in and
whilst performance had diminished it appeared more stable but then the
crashes occurred again. I changed the memory back to the older one
with slower latency but still same, put my new modules back in and set
an XMP profile which made it 1800 C9 timings but again after all
seeming well it eventually crashed. I’ve downclocked everything well
below default too. The system has been tested for stability and
memtest run on all the modules with zero errors. The only other thing
I could test was putting the old 920 back in but after spending £700
on a new 980x cpu that is NOT an option. I thought I had it cracked
last night. As the error can occur anywhere I thought maybe it’s my
FS Global 2010 mesh, disabled it but nope crashed.
So after all this I’ve removed the whole flaming thing from my system,
ripped my Saitek Flight Yoke and Throttles off the desk and abandoning
it all for at least a year until MS Flight arrives. Perhaps it will
work better as FSX, whilst technically brilliant and the only thing I
really use on the pc, is also the biggest pile of s**t. I have NEVER
in my life come across a program that crashes so much on all my
systems which have different motherboards, cpus, hard disks, graphics
cards and OS.
I’ve made a lot of friends in the FS Community and this is the only FS
forum I post too, but in the interim it’s a goodbye to you all and I
hope to see you again sometime in the future when the next release
comes along. I’m sure I will still lurk about for any news but I wont
be simming as its diverted my attention too much lately from what’s
really important in life and left me so frustrated and probably not
great company.
All the best to you all
Ibby
(Chris Ibbotson)
After being an avid fan of aviation most of my life and enjoying the
freedom to ‘travel’ anywhere in the world in the sim for the past 8
years I’m having to give it up to save my sanity.
Over the years I’ve enjoying using FS9 then into FSX, purchased £100s
and £100s of pounds on add ons but more importantly spend thousands on
pc hardware and upgrades to get the best performance it can give. As
some of you know I have one heck of a high specification pc but that
all means nothing when you have a program like FSX which is so full of
bugs and errors which the FS Community fail to find solutions for.
Only 4 months ago I went from an i7 920 to a 980X and my 295GTX up to
a 480GTX, also changed my 1600 (8.8.8.24) DDR3 memory to 1600
(6.8.6.24), these 3 items cost me in excess of £1200 and what a waste
of money it’s been. This follows spending about £2000 building an
upgraded system about 12 months before and about £3000 18 months
before that.
I’ve become SO frustrated trying everything possible to get rid of the
dreaded errors and CTDs that besiege FSX. In Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) I
often got the dreaded Black Screen of Death, often caused by switching
to the desktop or simply clicking a menu and the graphics system
failing to redraw the screen though the sound continued. There was no
way out of it apart from closing the sim and starting again. I was
getting NTDLL.dll errors and more frustrating D3D.dll errors. Could
happily be flying along and between 10mins or over 2hrs the sim would
suddenly freeze with the hourglass, after a few mins an error report
would state the D3D.dll module has caused the crash. It’s the most
popular form of error in FSX but NO one knows how to fix it. I have
followed forums by NickN etc. It can happen on any part of the planet
or any aircraft so I know it’s not faulty scenery etc. Many say it
relates to the graphics driver or DirectX but they are both up to
date, Ive also tried older drivers. Ive tried adding lines into the
config file which flag a warning if textures etc fail to load as this
can cause CTDs but nothing.
I have worked solidly for the past 4 months pulling what little hair I
have left out to no avail. I’ve wiped the system, reinstalled the OS
and up-to-date drivers, installed the sim with minimal addons like
UTX, tried lowering overclocks on gpu and cpu, ran at stock speeds,
used a fresh vanilla config file, tried tweaks, tried various display
settings, tried adjusting graphic driver settings for AA, AF etc at
driver level and also forced through nvidia inspector but NOTHING
works. I managed to track down a copy of Windows XP 64 bit and set up
a dual boot and reinstalled FSX (after uninstalling it all from
Windows 7). Whilst things improved slightly like no more black
screens the D3D.dll error is still there so it can’t be an OS or
driver issue. Now my frustrations have increased since I upgraded the
hardware recently so as final tests I put the 295GTX back in and
whilst performance had diminished it appeared more stable but then the
crashes occurred again. I changed the memory back to the older one
with slower latency but still same, put my new modules back in and set
an XMP profile which made it 1800 C9 timings but again after all
seeming well it eventually crashed. I’ve downclocked everything well
below default too. The system has been tested for stability and
memtest run on all the modules with zero errors. The only other thing
I could test was putting the old 920 back in but after spending £700
on a new 980x cpu that is NOT an option. I thought I had it cracked
last night. As the error can occur anywhere I thought maybe it’s my
FS Global 2010 mesh, disabled it but nope crashed.
So after all this I’ve removed the whole flaming thing from my system,
ripped my Saitek Flight Yoke and Throttles off the desk and abandoning
it all for at least a year until MS Flight arrives. Perhaps it will
work better as FSX, whilst technically brilliant and the only thing I
really use on the pc, is also the biggest pile of s**t. I have NEVER
in my life come across a program that crashes so much on all my
systems which have different motherboards, cpus, hard disks, graphics
cards and OS.
I’ve made a lot of friends in the FS Community and this is the only FS
forum I post too, but in the interim it’s a goodbye to you all and I
hope to see you again sometime in the future when the next release
comes along. I’m sure I will still lurk about for any news but I wont
be simming as its diverted my attention too much lately from what’s
really important in life and left me so frustrated and probably not
great company.
All the best to you all
Ibby
(Chris Ibbotson)